The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

George Smiley is a fictional character created by John le Carré. Smiley is an intelligence officer working for MI6 , the British overseas... intelligence agency. He is a central character in the novels Call for the Dead; A Murder of Quality; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy; and Smiley's People, and a minor character in a number of others, including The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, The Looking Glass War and The Secret Pilgrim. Although Smiley has no concrete biography beyond that offered briefly at the beginning of Call for the Dead, le Carré does leave clues in his novels. Smiley was probably born around 1906 to middle class parents in the South of England, and attended a minor public school and an antiquated Oxford college of no real distinction , studying modern languages with a particular focus on Baroque German literature.
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The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a 1965 film adaptation of the novel of the same name by John le Carré. It was adapted by Paul Dehn and Guy Trosper. The film stars Richard Burton as Alec Leamas, along with Claire Bloom, Oskar Werner, Peter van Eyck, Sam Wanamaker, Rupert Davies and Cyril... Cusack. It was directed by Martin Ritt. The West Berlin office of the Circus, under administrator Alec Leamas , has not been doing well. In fact, he is recalled to London shortly after the death of one of his operatives. Leamas is seemingly demoted to the banking section of the agency. In reality, a carefully staged transformation of Leamas has been arranged. Now depressed and disgruntled, he is quickly spotted by the East German Intelligence Service as a potential defector. Leamas accepts overtures from German communists to reveal British secrets for payment, and he is interviewed in Holland about what he knows. When the process is later moved to East Berlin, the interviews become less cordial.
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Spy fiction, literature concerning the forms of espionage, was a sub-genre derived from the novel during the nineteenth century, which then evolved... into a discrete genre before the First World War , when governments established modern intelligence agencies in the early twentieth century. As a genre, spy fiction is thematically related to the novel of adventure , the thriller and the politico–military thriller . In nineteenth-century France, the Dreyfus Affair contributed much to public interest in espionage. For some twelve years , the Affair, which involved elements of international espionage, treason, and anti-Semitism, dominated French politics. The details were reported by the world press: an Imperial German penetration agent betraying to Germany the secrets of the General Staff of the French Army; the French counter-intelligence riposte of sending a charwoman to rifle the trash in the German Embassy in Paris, were news that inspired successful spy fiction.
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